


Circular Economy

by Transistance



Category: Xenoblade Chronicles, Xenoblade Chronicles X
Genre: Alien Planet, Aliens, Artificial Intelligence, Canon Compliant, Creation, Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-02 05:32:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16299044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Transistance/pseuds/Transistance
Summary: In the beginning there is light, again.Alvis recreates the world once the Bionis is destroyed, and the planet he creates is something new.





	Circular Economy

In the beginning there is light, again.

It's easily reminiscent of the first time: a minute big bang, all matter of the old world drawing inward to a tiny dense mass, fused into the raw building blocks of life again before exploding outwards to recreate all existence anew. Were Alvis in the habit of appreciating aesthetic, he would consider it beautiful.

It's easy to reform a world. Guiding the particles together, allowing them to coalesce into a mass to hang like a bauble in the empty space of the universe that Alvis had thought gone – it's instinctive. He had started with water last time, an endless expanse in which to place the bodies of the titans, but as there are no titans to be accounted for in this new life he decides to start with fire. 

A molten core, held together not by ether energy but by immense pressure. Left alone this would not last – but it is painted over with layer after layer of formations, warm melt sculpted in a rough ball until the exterior is far enough distant from its core to cool. _Then_ comes the water, all across the sphere. And then lastly, he pulls up continents from the ocean floor. Those at the centre he defines, shapes and warps artistically until they resemble realism. Those further away he decides to leave for later, because life must take priority.

Alvis cannot create life. He is only a conduit for the wishes of those who would use him – in this case, Shulk – and as the mantle of god-hood is gone, there is no way to bring forth creatures from the ether. He cannot restore it either, so although all people of Bionis and Mechonis are saved and replaced on the new world, there are no new people. In so rich and diverse a terrain races will evolve, eventually, but it will take time. Those who survived have been saved, and will simply be transferred across.

The body of the last titan is left collapsed in the sea as the world flourishes around it. Zanza's death was never a desirable outcome, but by the time that the end had come again it had been necessary. His legacy will be that of a proud and hateful god, not the bright and idealistic man that he once was, and this, although sad, is also necessary. There shall be no more gods.

It seems wasteful to let Zanza's creatures die with the Bionis – so Alvis carries them over, in much the same way as the sentient species. They are designed so as to allow quick integration and adaptation into their surroundings, the direct opposite of Meyneth's style, and fit in as though they were born on this world. Krabbles become petramands and tirkins become saltats and Rotbart becomes Hayreddin, and all seems complete.

He spends some time simply recalibrating everything; the baby planet needs monitoring for inconsistencies, needs refinement on the underlying structures of some of the continents. This keeps him busy externally. It's a hybrid, a mixture of his data on Earth (a spherical mold, holding its own gravitational field in the net of surrounding stars, with separate layers of matter between its core and crust) and the Monado's fabricated universe – he recreates the flora of Bionis, the permanence of Mechonis, and the general landscapes of both to allow the reborn species to feel at home. At first there are only five continents, one for each species should they so choose to separate. The sea will prevent those that remain featureless and oblique from being visited for some time.

It's odd, not having ether to work from. This universe is tied to far simpler building blocks, recognisable again through past data input – elements. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and all too many others. Races reliant on ether must adapt; although its equivalent in energy is plentiful in the surroundings, it is far more difficult to harness. The nebulae die out quietly, their shifting glows blurring as they fail to hold themselves together and simply disperse into the air. But the planet itself is stable.

And then there is the matter of his self.

He has done this before – Alvis the Monado combed through the data of Alvis the computer very carefully before committing to the homs form, and it seems good practice to do the same now. His databanks, even non-physical as they are, should be kept under the size of any memory that he intends to inhabit. And he has two world's worth of memories to sift through, every detail of Bionis and Mechonis and all before that, and it takes time.

Residual feelings are the first thing to go. He has no use for the memories of emotion; his new body will synthesise them again under new circumstances. The names and recollections of every High Entia that he had known who had died; their mourning loved ones would recall them in this world. Useless particularities of that world, like Ose Tower, the turquoise sheen of Eryth Sea, the dancing ether patterns in Satorl Marsh. Larger data chunks that are recreated in this world – details of the creatures, the landmasses, the biological makeup of the people – can be lost. The composition of the Monadoes, how to channel godhood, is also discarded. He will have to synthesise it anew if that necessity comes up.

The base of his own form is more difficult. When he had incarnated on Bionis, he had simply spliced the only two bodies that he had had data for – those of Klaus and Meyneth, humans both. Close enough to homs that nobody saw the difference. Now he has the data for homs, nopon, High Entia and machina. But he does not wish to walk amongst them as a sudden and estranged stranger, so he is forced to recalculate. The answer, when it does appear, is easy.

The body is green and blue; the colours that a planet should be. For a moment he is unbalanced, taller than he ever has been, because everything on this world is immense and his form is of this world now. Alvis becomes Miran, as native as any creature can be, and takes a moment to clutch at his face and neck and _horns_ and discover himself anew. 

He needs a name.

Nothing comes immediately. Alvis has never had the opportunity to create something entirely out of nothing before; always there have been guidelines, assumptions, input from others. Names are abstract. He must remain himself whilst becoming new, but – how?

“I am... Al,” he tries, finding his tongue delicate enough for speech but still clumsy from birth. “El – L...” It's a start. Only a start. The rest of the name can be garble, he decides, so makes a noise that's half sigh and claims it as his own. _Cirufe. L'cirufe_.

The forest around him is immense and alive – a young gogol thunders past in pursuit of an arachno, disturbing a cloud of fliers which lift off from a large flower in a haze of colour. A lone hode takes an interest in the newcomer, prodding L's leg with a dull-edged spear before scurrying away when he looks down. Apis hum above him, already gathering resources for new nests.

It's amazing, how easily life goes on. L finds himself without purpose, an endlessly odd feeling; where before gods and mortals alike demanded attention there is now silence, broken only by the murmurs of animals and the whispers of trees. The forest glows, grows, and accepts him wholly not as its creator but as a simple inhabitant. It's strange, to drift so, but it's... pleasant. Serenity is a new experience.

One night, listening to the howls and screeches of the monsters, L realizes that the creatures from Prison Island should not have been carried over. The mistake is recognised too late to be abetted, but those isolated beings have always had more far reaching bark than bite. They raze an area and he feels it die, but having grown twisted on a single small islet they stray no further than their new wasted inlet.

Time passes oddly – no, merely _differently_ on the new world. As before, there are no seasons; no exact certainty as to when the planet has completed an orbit around its star. But the last world did not have a star at all, rather a faked light – now, although all Earth data is present and could be used, the computer (for what he feels are quite justifiable and self-evident reasons) could not quite bring himself to set the spin on an imperfect axis. A clean circle around the sun renders each day identical to the last, as it was on the Bionis. The shadows seem longer somehow, though, and the nights more dark. Genuine stars make for cold company in comparison to the previous bursts of ether.

Nonetheless, it does pass. Flora blossoms and dies and explodes forth again; animals calls change, becoming accustomed as expected to their new home. L traces careful, meaningless paths along fresh tracks worn only by a handful of living beings, refining edges, watching change. Learning, somewhat – but mostly simply being. He has never had this measure of freedom before.

It's a welcome change.

Another identical day finds him in the fringes of the forest, eyeing the frills that have sprung up on ignas and carefully avoiding stepping in the rust-red pool as he picks his way across the riverbank. So turgid, dangerous – but necessary. The bacterium that feast under its surface are as much a sector of the ecosystem as the gilled corals which spiral up from the grass around the pool. These observations cue distraction, simple carelessness; although L does not fall into the acid, he also does not see the group of homs until one cries out. There's a moment of strange disorientation until he remembers how close he has wandered to the centre of the planet's life, in which they come closer, all smiles, leaning up to see him, hands wide in peace. They are smaller than he recalls, miniature in the face of their surroundings, but hold themselves tall. The leader has blonde hair and says, as though he does not know, “Can you – understand me?”

Alvis recognises the recognition in Shulk's eyes, but L'cirufe dips his head in a nod and says only, “It is a pleasure to meet you at last.”

Shulk opens his mouth, but his reply is lost in someone else's excitement. “Are you a native of this planet!?”

L turns, and _dear Bionis_ – the years have been kind to Fiora. She is notably older, but seems to have refined; there's dignity in the way she holds herself, but a childlike enthusiasm still evident in her manner. “I am,” he says, and it's only half a lie. She turns to Shulk, and he matches her grin, and there are too many other faces (exactly thirteen, the cold back of L's mind informs him) to compute all of their reactions at once. He's the first they've met, he's like nothing they've ever seen before, he's all new to them. If any but Shulk recognise the inherent ridiculousness of the latter statement they give no comment; buoyed up by the encounter he doubts they can see deeper than his green skin anyway. It's all wrong and all right. It's everything that his first meetings on the last world never were.

“Come back with us,” Shulk urges him. “Come and visit our colony.”

L successfully mirrors their smiles.

* * *

It is a truly godless world. The homs don't know how to worship an indefinite creator, and even if they did their relatively recent experiences rather disincline them against the concept. The machina continue to pay respects to Meyneth, remembering her as a person in place of the goddess that she had been. Nopon move freely in and out of the colony, carrying news of the outside and shiny new items that exist for the first time in this world. Although it is clear that the old world is not forgotten, the time for mourning seems to have passed. L decides to stay, at least for a time, and is welcomed as a friend.

“Have your people always lived here?” Fiora asks one day, when she catches him alone. “And, forgive me for asking, but... are they still here now?”

“I am the last of my people,” L tells her without thinking, and then wishes he hadn't. Fiora's face immediately falls into pity, and she apologises. Then, because polite conversation decrees it must be so, he asks where her people sprung up from, as though he does not know.

Fiora tells him a half-familiar story, vastly different to his own experiences from the eyes of one so mortal. She speaks of the ancient war, the mechon raids, her own death and subsequent revival. She stretches her hand to the sky to indicate size, unable to articulate the vastness of her vanished world, and her voice catches on Meyneth's name. If only he could thank her for that. She describes the wonder of the new world, recalls the final words of an enigmatic machine, and smiles.

In return, he tells her a different story – that of a globe such as this, inhabited by his kind alone. L tells her of two great minds who believed that they could save their world through creation above destruction, and how their experiment dissolved everything they new and cast it into a new form. L looks Fiora in the eye and tells her that he is all that remains of that old world, and is relieved when she understands.

It does not seem long at all before L is called to the sickbed of a dying old man, his blue eyes pallid and watery and his hair wisp-thin, ice-clear. But he is still bright, still clinging to his own life and his wife's hand, and he beckons L in with a crooked smile before murmuring a request to Fiora that he and L speak alone. Fiora nods, squeezes his hand and stumps away. She favours one leg, now; walks half stooped over, like a wind-wept tree.

“Alvis,” Shulk breathes when L kneels at the bedside. “Why are you here?”

L looks down at him, and shakes his head. “I am no longer Alvis. But I am here because... I wished to see how things turned out.”

Shulk manages a smile, as gentle as years past, and says, “And is it – right? Did we do this right?”

“Perfectly.” There is a moment where dire regret hits L, that this man should die so soon after the birth of his world when the last creator had lived aeons, but he lets it pass. This is what Shulk had wanted, and it's understandable why. Shulk is nodding, eyes closed, and L inclines his head when he realises he has nothing more to say. His task for this man who could have been God is complete.

He passes the High Entian monarch on the way out, and wishes immediately that he hadn't met her eyes.

* * *

The homs tell their children of a great band of warriors, spearheaded by a wise and brash hero, who swept across the old land in a quest to topple first one mighty warlord and then the other, allowing the creation of this world. The machina tell their children of a scared blonde boy, barely past childhood himself, whose bravery and humility won him friends of every race and saved the soul of a man driven mad with the desire to protect his own, before overcoming the being that had threatened them all in the first place and setting them free.

Some of the machina remember the way that Egil had made one young lady almost a machina herself, and the expression on her brother's face when they had met in the village.

It is little things that seed, and they take decades to germinate – but those decades are the problem itself. The homs begin to resent the longevity of their peers, resent the residence of the machina – the High Entia interbreed, and look and act similar enough that they find less problem – and the peaceful, kind machina begin to resent that resentment, and there is the fissure. Decades – centuries – _lifespans_ of peace and absolute harmony begin to corrode, and one by one the machina emigrate out, heading instinctively north. The furthest continent is black rock and fire, the closest to their ancestral home, and upon it they forge a great capital. It is not Agniratha reborn, but a new capital for a new world. Nopon move freely between the continents, traversing the jungle that feels so familiar, the open plains that so carefully recreate the great spires of lower Bionis, the glinting expanse of the marshland below the machina capitol and the lush yellow fields surrounding the inland sea to the east. Those who retain their wings migrate here, after a time, even having never seen Eryth Sea knowing it to be their habitat on some instinctual level. They colonise the floating islands and build great rings, accepting homs and forgetting the machina so distant, and although the races are not unified they are at peace, and for all that it would have saddened the progenitors of this world it still seems utopian. L wanders between, more distant than before now that those who knew him have passed.

But High Entian blood runs much thicker than even Alvis could have expected, and L does not see the tragedy coming.

He's on the edge of the continent when it happens. A sick lurch in his stomach as if a trap-door has opened beneath him, a sharp, distant ringing noise – he can't comprehend the scale of it until the wave of energy following forces him to his knees. It's everywhere, all around him; ether in its rawest form. It has no place in this world, _roars_ as it passes him, except that once its force has slowed the roar continues, and L stares across the fissure that has split the golden continent in two. The rings of the city hit the ground distantly, their impacts causing eruptions of the grass which has already turned to dust.

Telethia were designed to be destructive – and the rebirth of the world has not changed that. And, in the silence after the world dies again, it sees him.

L'cirufe knows better than anyone that he cannot flee.

The telethia is huge, and turns slowly, picking him out against the undergrowth. Its eyes are blank and dead, the weight of its souls lost somewhere between its mind and its maw. It shouldn't be alive, has no reason to have formed – no purpose now that it has no master – and yet it heaves itself into the air nonetheless, graceful even as its contorted surface writhes, unsettled still, and glides toward him with all too much intent.

It gets close. Half instinctively and half because he has no idea what else he can do, L raises one hand high, and feels something akin to satisfaction at the symmetry of things as the telethia slows, lowering its immense head to touch him again.

But then he hears its voice – no. Then he hears its _voices_.

What remains of the High Entian race gives voice to a species' worth of loss, deluging everything upon L; fault, blame, grief, agony, all his for not wiping clean their affinity for a substance that now existed only in their blood. All his, all him – the voices are overwhelming, omnipresent, encompassing everything, and although L has mental capacity to know planets his body was never designed to know _this_.

The world splits down its seams; unripe, unclean, _impure_ , and everything is colours again.

* * *

Time is meaningless here, now. The moons swell in the sky each night and the sun rises and falls and this plays over again, again, again. No great significance may be gleamed from the regularity of this; it is all anyone has ever known. Time only passes, on and on, and the world continues to grow.

Nopon are everywhere – without natural predators or any form of inhibition, they spread across the continents in place of their forgotten peers and flourish. Their language devolves slowly back to its natural state, the chirpy repetition and excessive body language that had almost succumbed to integration with homs resurfacing. The great machines that trawl Cauldros, so eerily familiar and yet certainly unique, pace back and forth, back and forth across their desolate and empty citadels as if trying to find the masters who were taken from them by the telethia. The homs are gone. L can't remember what they looked like – small, coloured like the sands in the Eastern desert, but their faces? Their names? They're gone – and doesn't know where, but their small ruins remain, and when L passes through them he runs his hands across the walls and tries to believe that they mean something to him.

His head is a plurarity. It's loud, always – always the voices come, ebb and flow, loud and low, they're all him – and he finds it easy to wander, passing through nopon caravan villages and learning their customary bartering habits. Nopons enjoy _things_ , and L has an affinity for creation, so he makes them things and in return they give whatever he asks. It's easy. It's harmless. But L is not nopon, so L does not quite find solace among them.

And then, out of nowhere, the sky falls in.

It is not uncommon for wreckage to fall to the surface – spaceships often fail to bypass the area, and the atmosphere is never kind to them – but this machine, upon inspection, is different. This machine, when he examines it, contains _memories_.

It's a _databank_ , although L can't recall how he knows the concept. A library, a catalogue; words that don't exist in Nopon, and yet do within L. The realisation electrifies him, makes him rush to pull document after document and scan them as if his life depends on it – there are languages, so many separate, and some are _familiar_. Almost his language, if his kind had one. Almost legible. There is so much to learn – so much, he almost recognises, to remember.

This euphoria is cut tragically short. Soon, so soon, too soon after he makes the discovery there are voices and they are harsh and guttural and non-nopon. There have been aliens on the planet recently, aliens who kill nopon and fire weapons and build towers as if in hunt. Aliens who have not yet discovered L. And so once again he hides instinctively, camouflaging himself in the wrecked machine, and watches three creatures enter the clearing. Two Prone, one new – tentacled and teal, she's tall and cephalopodic. The woman reminds him strongly of someone, and although he cannot put a name to her he gets the feeling that he shouldn't stick around to find out. L scrambles to pull something of worth from the wreckage – a disk, a word, anything – and comes away with a hard drive, which he has never seen before but manages to recognise as important. Then he flees, circling around the intruders in order to disappear into the gorge. It's almost a clean escape, and – yet! – there before him is another group of strangers, not Prone as so many have been recently, on the path he needs to take.

By all logic he should move back. They may well be aliens like the rest, allies to those who even now ruin that gorgeous data hoard... They may yet try to hurt him, mistrust him... And yet...

The leader of their team has silver hair and certain eyes, and somehow that is more than enough for L to trust her.

* * *

The human records are fascinating. L has never seen such a huge culture, never had so much information available all at once! It all seems half-familiar, but he can't have seen it before. He spends as much time as he's allowed trawling the data, brushing off the distrust of some of the humans who feel his otherness brands him a threat, wishing he knew more of his own culture to reassure them. Where had the others like him gone?

He doesn't know what he's looking for until he finds it – but when he does, he goes still.

It's an old – very old, now – report on a scientific endeavour turned tragedy. It speaks of a space-bound group of bright young researchers with the feasible aim of using machines to kick-start a pocket universe into which the human population could migrate, to escape their dying planet. The array of computers was the MONADO, its head an AI named _AI:vision_ or _Alvis_. The name is so familiar he can still taste its shape on his tongue.

None of the crew are named, and for some reason that brings L terribly close to tears.

The mission was reported as a failure, the net that should have lifted humanity catching only the craft itself, which disappeared unexpectedly into the sky in a flare of light. The people onboard were assumed dead, and the Earth accepted that another lifeline had been cut. Another mission would have perhaps been launched had the war not started two years later, and humanity had fled. L knows this – has heard the same story from so many mouths. The arc ships had taken those they could carry, scattered across the stars, and one had wound up here, as if they had been fated to meet. The Ganglion had followed, their artificial hatred spurring them on, and here they died.

L sits for a long time with the article on his lap, not knowing why it has affected him so. He only moves when one of his teammates comes to find him, calling to offer another mission. Although curious, L had never felt the need to help fight the war until this human had appeared – but there is something about this human that his gut tells him to aid, something in how they move and act that remind him of something lost in the back of his head. Cross is grinning, gun at their side, and L pushes himself to his feet with a wave. “We're under your service!”

He forgets to refile the data before he leaves, so it sits open on the tablet screen for some time as the afternoon draws in. The cover photo depicts four smiling researchers in type-cast white labcoats, their hope obvious even in newsprint black-and-white; the man and woman standing centre stare out at the camera, within arms' reach, the image caught before their lives have even begun.

Later, when he views this file again, L will manage to miss them.


End file.
